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The line is long. The line is long, and time is short, and Shimizu Kiyoko feels that she maybe could have planned a tiny bit better. Maybe they should have left the apartment at seven, and gotten there bright and early and long before the crowd could form. Maybe they should have taken more time eating breakfast. Maybe she should have seen this coming. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Either way, now Kiyoko and her girlfriend are stuck. Outside. In the heat of the sun, in the middle of a throng of people, in line for the best aquarium this side of Japan.
Kiyoko fervently hopes that it will be worth it.
Hitoka, at least, looks excited; she’s bouncing on the balls of her feet, tilting her head this way and that and humming softly. Her eyes are bright, a sketchbook tucked beneath her arm and a pencil up behind her ear. She’s wearing one of Kiyoko’s college sweaters with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and falling in thick spiral folds around her arms and waist. Her hair’s pulled back from her face, her jeans are ripped, and her boots give her an extra half-inch of height, and wow, maybe Kiyoko wouldn’t mind waiting in this line for a good while longer.
So of course, right then, it inches forwards. And forwards. And forwards. Within no time at all, they’ve reached the front of the queue.
Kiyoko feels a little robbed, but when Hitoka looks up at her with strands with of hair falling to frame her face and trembling with excitement, she thinks that she’ll be able to manage.
“Two tickets? Adult?” The woman behind the counter asks.
“Yes, please,” Kiyoko says quietly. Out comes her wallet- Hitoka had insisted on paying for breakfast, and Kiyoko agreed, provided that she could pay for this- the money is exchanged, and into the building they go.
Hitoka takes her hand. There are little flecks of paint of her knuckles and bits of chipped nail polish from a few weeks ago still clinging to her fingertips. Her skin is soft.
“Let’s go, let's go!” she exclaims, hands fluttering and words racing. She walks faster and faster, tugging Kiyoko across the tiled floors and up the stairs. Halfway up she draw to a sharp halt, jolts Kiyoko to a stop and then tugs her to the edge of the platform so she can marvel at the model submarine suspended from the ceiling for a moment. She coos at the painted rivets and screws and metal plates, mumbles about technique and effect and impact .
“Do you think I’ll ever make anything that cool?” she says, still looking up and up.
Kiyoko follows her lead, stands and stares at the sculpture and the thin bits of fishing wire and the big, rotund and lumpy shapes, and it’s… well, it’s something. Maybe she’s a little biased, but she thinks Hitoka’s art is much, much better.
“I think so,” she replies, tilting her head. “I think you already have.”
Hitoka flushes, maneuvering awkwardly around her sketchbook to hide her face in her hands. For a moment, Kiyoko worries that she’ll dislodge the pencil behind her ear, but Hitoka’s long learned how to move in such a way that she doesn’t disturb whatever she may have on her person at any given time. She’s flexible like that.
Hitoka, having gotten over her embarrassment, is back to excitement. She pulls at Kiyoko’s hand again, and then they’re off into the dark hallway that will bring them to the actual aquarium.
The hallway opens up into a wide, wide, crowded space. Hitoka sticks close to her side as the murmur of the crowd swells and the last of the fluorescents disappear, leaving them walking in the watery blue of the lights from the tanks. It’s eerie, here; strange. Person upon person shambles across the room, raising cameras to their eyes and halfheartedly scolding rambunctious children. A hand taps relentlessly at one of the glass panes. Somebody starts hacking up a lung near the shark tank. Someone else is laughing, wildly and without restraint, the sort of near-hysteric laughter that is boisterous and boiling and pinging off the metal columns placed intermittently around the room. In the air hangs the sharp tang of salt, the heaviness of unfamiliarity, and the awkward, twining murmur of conversation.
Hitoka squeezes her hand. Kiyoko squeezes back.
The very first tank they come to is one of the big ones. Floor-to-ceiling, swarming with children at its base and squirming with fish on its insides, swarms of sharks and twisted coral formations broken by the soft bellies of the sting-rays. There’s an eel curled up around one of the rocks. It lazily opens its jaw, showing off a row of razor-sharp teeth pulled along the curve of its mouth.
Hitoka’s eyes grow very, very big. She leads the both of them to one of the benches, finds a space that’s (miraculously) open, and plops straight down, pulling Kiyoko besides her.
Now, Kiyoko knows her girlfriend, and she knows her well. This was fully expected. And as Hitoka opens her sketchbook to a blank page, and grabs up her pencil, and starts sketching one of the bigger, slow-moving fish, Kiyoko settles herself for what she’s sure will be a quick session.
She’s right; not long after she tears her eyes away from Hitoka (who’s got her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, and her eyes crinkled in concentration, and looks very good at the moment) to look at the fish, and the sting-rays, and the eel, Hitoka’s snaps her book shut and shoves the pencil behind her ear.
“Which one’s your favorite?” she asks, swinging her legs. Kiyoko considers for a moment.
Up in the corner, right near where the tank curves, there’s a little fish that’s bright purple and almond-shaped, with long, streamy fins that flit back and forth very, very quickly. But there’s also something big and brown and bumpy lying in the sand, something that’s got teeth flattened and triangular like a child’s drawing of a jack-o-lantern and eyes that are dead and bulging. She won’t pretend to know what it is, but it looks kinda cool.
Then a big fish floats past, setting the smaller ones scattered and panicking. For a moment, just a moment it looks so forlorn that Kiyoko can’t help but laugh.
“That one,” she says, pointing. “It reminds me Asahi.”
Hitoka stops swinging her legs in favor of leaning forwards and squinting. Then she erupts into giggles, hiding her mouth behind her hand as her smile stretches wide and she snorts once or twice.
“It does ,” she gasps. “Oh it does. And look, look, that one looks like Hinata!” She points up at the little purple one, which is now swimming in scared half-loops. It does remind her of the way Hinata gets jumpy and fidgety, especially after he’s consumed two straight cups of coffee.
Another fish floats past, this one big (big, BIG) and fast and striped in white-and-black from its eyes to the tips of its tail. Kiyoko looks at Hitoka. Hitoka looks at Kiyoko.
“Bokuto,” they both say, and then the giggling starts again.
“One more, one more,” Hitoka states through her laughs. She points to a fish, one of the shiny ones that’s silver all the way through and streamlined, lazily drifting and it looks like-
“Kuroo,” Hitoka says. She sounds confident, surer if herself than she ever has, and at first Kiyoko doesn’t understand a bit. But upon closer inspection there’s something about the fish that undeniably screams Kuroo - it’s the eyes, she thinks, which are cold and flat but also very much alive.
“ Huh, ” she breathes.
She stands, tugging Hitoka up besides her and slipping through the crowd until she’s close to the glass. The fish drifts closer. Kiyoko can feel the smug grin.
“I feel like it’s about to tell me that I need to eat better,” Hitoka murmurs. “It’s going to be right, of course. I had Pepsi for breakfast yesterday. Then when I tell it that, it’s going to make me sit on my couch while it cooks me dinner and I watch TV, and it’s going to be the best meal I’ve ever had, and then I’m going to owe it my entire life, oh dear, oh dear.”
Keeping her eyes locked in the fish, she fumbles in her pocket until she has her phone. Up comes the camera app, and Hitoka leans forwards and sticks her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as she snaps a picture.
“Good thinking,” Kiyoko says from her side. She nods gravely, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “This needs to be shared.”
“Absolutely,” Hitoka mumbles.
“Absolutely,” Kiyoko echoes.
After the (jointly captioned) picture is sent to their group chat- and both of them turn off their phones to save themselves from the sudden flood of texts- they join hands again and head out into the crowds.
Next is the short hallway that funnels into a much smaller, more cramped room. It’s circular, and the crowds are surprisingly sparse; nobody, Kiyoko supposes, would want to find themselves bumping against strangers’ shoulders, stepping on toes and elbowing sides and having to apologize over and over again.
Hitoka drifts over to the nearest tank. This one’s standalone, a glass cube set up on a wooden platform holding craggy rocks and piles of sand that lead down into a pool. Up on the shore, ten many-jointed legs and a disk of leathery skin sit beneath the shell of a crab. It slowly snaps its claws, eyes listing on their stalks and plated shell shifting. It scuttles off into the water the moment they approach.
“Someone’s a little crabby,” Hitoka murmurs.
“What a clawful attitude,” Kiyoko adds.
Hitoka snorts. “That was bad .”
“And yours wasn’t?”
“Nope!” Hitoka shakes her head. “Mine was fantastic! Fintastic, in fact.”
“Naturally.”
“Of course.”
“Nothing fishy about that.”
Hitoka smiles, eyes glinting mischievously.
“Please! On a scale from one-to-ten, my jokes are always an eel-even! I’m never left floundering for something to say!” She says, looking very proud of herself.
Kiyoko huffs, turning on her heel and marching off towards the next tank. She’s sure to keep her steps slow and sure so that Hitoka can catch up easily.
And catch up she does, sketchbook clutched to her chest and lips twisted into a pout.
“Rude,” she murmurs. Kiyoko pulls a face at her. Hitoka pulls one back. Kiyoko twists her features even more, into dramatized lines and dips and scrunches. Without fail, without a breath between or an ounce of hesitation, Hitoka copies.
They both break into giggles again.
“Lets see the seahorses next,” Hitoka says. She holds her arm out with a flourish, in one big, sweeping, movement. “Shall we?”
Kiyoko clasps her hands around Hitoka’s elbow, sure to keep her back ramrod straight and her head held high. No point to dramatics if both of their hearts aren’t in it. No point at all.
So to the seahorses they march, falling into a rhythm as they duck around other aquarium-goers and dart through schools of small children.
The seahorses are nice. Hitoka points out the way that their bodies tilt and turn in one straight line, and then she opens her sketchbook and follows the curves of their tails with her pencil, shades pectoral fins and dorsal fins and long, rounded snouts. Next she’s off and tugging Kiyoko to the big floor-to-ceiling columns, the big ones that are twice her height and lit up in oversaturated shades of pinks and blues. Those are filled to the brim with the moon jellyfish. Moon jellyfish- which Kiyoko has never seen before today- are apparently small, disk-shaped animals that are silky-smooth and curling at their edges.
Hitoka likes the jellyfish quite a bit.
Kiyoko thinks that she may like them even more.
There’s something alluring about the way that they move, about the aimless drifting and the slow spreading and contraction of their hoods. Complex animals, and simple ones; braided bunches of the oral arms and the small curls of the string-thin tentacles twining and weaving over-under, over-under each other. And then there’s the soft movement at the center of the bell, the constant, steady pulsating, and the effect is pretty enough to sprawl over a whole page of Hitoka’s sketchbook. They’re wholly mesmerizing beneath the artificial lights. Soft in their movement, serene in their billowing membranes, rounded in the emptiness of the tanks.
Maybe she’s romanticizing (likely she’s romanticizing) but they’re growing on her. So much so that it stings.
They go around to a few more tanks next. They’re at the tank with the garden eels- funny little creatures, like small snakes but turned vertical and stuck in the sand- when Hitoka begins tilting her head back-in-forth in that way she does when she’s getting ready to ask a question.
“Do you think we could see the octopus next?”
Full-stop and full-disclosure: Kiyoko is well aware of Hitoka’s fondness for octopuses. Since long before she suggested that they go to the aquarium, and Hitoka’s eyes lit up and her hands waved and her words bubbled up and over, she’s known. And maybe, (maybe maybe maybe) she had suggested this particular location solely to see the unbridled excitement on her face.
And maybe that’s a little selfish (sel-fish, shellfish, ha ), or maybe it’s not, but either way Kiyoko’s been looking forwards to this for a good long while.
So she nods, and off they go. They leave the small room first, double back down the hallway and out into the main portion. The two of them get sidetracked easily- though it’s not like they’ve got anywhere else to be, and there is certainly nothing else that Kiyoko would rather be doing- by the big turtles and the tiny poison-dart frogs, and the shrimp and the sea anemones. As they get closer to the octopus, though, Hitoka grows steadily more restless.
“Do you think that it’ll be out?” she asks. She squeezes Kiyoko’s hand, biting at her lip and looking frantically around at all of the tanks. She even reaches up on her tiptoes. Kiyoko feels affection swell up inside of her, soft and heavy and all-encompassing.
“I’m not sure. It’s not very active, right?”
“Hmmmm,” Hitoka hums, scrunching up her nose. “I don’t know, actually. But! Octopuses are really cool, you know! Very smart! They use tools, and they’ve got three hearts, and their blood is blue!”
“They’re cephalopods, too,” Kiyoko adds.
“Which is a fun word to say,” Hitoka finishes, nodding gravely.
“A very fun word.”
“And that is very important.”
“ Very important.”
The rest of their walk is filled with comfortable silence, and the odd octopus fact from Hitoka- she does stop once, stumbles and then hurries to push her sketchbook back up from where it was slipping beneath her arm, but nothing drops and no one falls so Kiyoko counts it as a win. A minute or so later, they’ve arrived at the tank holding the octopus.
It’s hiding somewhere, not active or out at all, which is a good thing only in that the people crowding around the tank get bored fast and move on faster. Hitoka, though, seems determined; one minute passes and she shows no signs of movement, two minutes pass and the octopus shows no signs of movement, and by three minutes something in the back of Kiyoko’s mind is shifting restlessly.
She’ll wait for as long as Hitoka needs- Kiyoko’s not perfect, sure, but she’s willing to wait, even if she doesn’t fully understand Hitoka’s excitement- but she is human. She’s getting restless.
And then, imperceptibly, cautiously, carefully and in the corner of her eye, something shifts.
Hitoka gasps, taking a deep breath and crowding up towards the tank. Her shoulders are tensed in excitement, her muscles bunched and her fingers scrabbling for her sketchbook and her pencil. From a crevice, from a gash in the rock, the octopus creeps out.
First the mantle, then the head. Cone-shaped and bumpy, ridged with eyes deep-set and slit-pupiled at the sides. Then the tentacles, unfurling and drifting and swirling, kicking up the silt and sending flurries of little white bubbles to the surface. The water ripples as it moves, as it curls around the coral and inches closer and closer and closer. Hitoka seems enamoured with the fluid movement, and the dips and furrows of its siphon, and the hollows of its eyes, and the lines of the mantle as it stretches back and back and up.
She says something, quietly and broken in her reverie, about reds and browns, stripes and splotches, chromatophores and papillae.
So Hitoka’s looking at the octopus, and Kiyoko-
Kiyoko’s looking at Hitoka.
She’s standing there, head tilted up and lips slightly parted as the octopus shifts. It slides along the ground, its sides undulating and billowing out, Hitoka breathing out sharply in time with its movement. Had she not been afraid of smudging the glass, Kiyoko knows, she’d be pressed up against it, running her fingers over the surface to the thrumming of the generators. Thousands and thousands of gallons of water, crudely contorted coral, a weak blue light and Hitoka standing somewhere in the midst of it all.
The clamor of the crowd has begun again in full, the excited yells of the children and the awed hums of the adults mixing and slurring in Kiyoko’s ears, but all dulling in comparison to Hitoka, Hitoka and her wide eyes and quick sketches as the octopus sidles right up to the glass, pulsing softly. She’s humming a single sustained tone, in that way she does when she’s either very, very happy, or very, very stressed. Her paper’s covered in stray marks, light sketches of curves and eyes and the curled, broken space between tentacles.
And Kiyoko loves her so, so much.
In the way that makes it feel like there are little fish darting in and out of her ribcage and wriggling in her stomach. In the way that takes her breath away in tiny bubbles and ripples and bursts of water. In the way that grows and roils and churns until it’s pounding against the cliff-face of her insides and setting her emotions howling, in the way that curls its tail around her thinner bones and flutters against her skin with delicate dorsal fins.
Hitoka stops her movement for a moment, turns to look up at Kiyoko, and smiles wide enough for her eyes to crinkle and her teeth to show.
Kiyoko smiles back. It’s softer, smaller, but sincere.
Hitoka turns away, again, shifting her attention back to her art. And Kiyoko turns away, for the first time, her attention still firmly on Hitoka.
Hitoka’s very happy. Kiyoko’s very happy.
Because right now, with Hitoka in the aquarium, with Hitoka in the mornings and Hitoka at nights, with Hitoka by her side and smiling up at her, she couldn’t be anything else at all. Not switched and scattered, not cut-up and incohesive. Not devastated and delirious, face flushed and head clouded with fever, not empty-eyed and absent, shoulders hunched and heart weighted by grief.
Not shifting and dissatisfied. Not ever-changing. Not sad.
She’s happy.
Hitoka closes her sketchbook two minutes later. Softly, this time, near reverently.
“Where to next?” she says, snapping Kiyoko from her reverie. She still feels off-kilter, thrown off balance and not fully there. Like her head’s stuck beneath gallons and gallons of water, and her spirits floating somewhere above the waves, and she’s nothing more than vacant and washed-out husk. A wreck of a person. Taken aback. Dumbstruck and dull.
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s alright,” Hitoka giggles. “We’ve got time.”
Then she holds out her hand, a small smile still playing on her lips, and eyes wide and shining. And Kiyoko swallows, feeling bone-dry and brain-dead, and shaky-kneed and off-guard and so, so full of life.
She doesn’t know where she wants to go next. She doesn’t. But that’s alright. She’s got time. Hitoka’s got time.
They’ve got time.
She takes Hitoka’s hand. Maybe they could go look at the jellyfish again; or maybe not. She was reading the bit on the signs about the nerve maps that run through their membranes before they left the tanks. It was very interesting information.
She’s always been weak to things that are interesting. Always, always.
Hitoka tugs her hand, and into the crowds they go.
Three steps in and they’re swallowed up again. It’s loud. It’s cramped. It’s uncomfortable.
“...”
She is very, very happy.